Tag Archives: emotional triggers

I’ve always been fascinated by photography. I love how it has the power to create a narrative or story with people. However, it can also become a dull and lifeless monologue. A simple headline statement, a chapter heading without real supportive content. Images that disclose everything in a simple hit, often risk getting overlooked and cognitively moved back as part of our visual familiarity background. In design, marketing and advertising, it becomes a missed moment to fully engage and capture the human imagination and senses. I’m more drawn to images that have a sense of mystery and intrigue about them…

‘memory clip’ photography in action from my time at Thomas Cook Signature

The immediacy and instant gratification of ‘getting’ or fully recognising an image without having to ‘work’ to engage the imagination, leaves very little actual story to tell. With no story, there is no engagement. With no engagement, the image slips away into obscurity…

This type of engagement in photography I term as being ‘memory clip’ imagery. Human memory is a very powerful subconscious emotion. The travel industry is a prime example of how important human memory and experiences are to a business. After all, holidays and travel are all about selling and creating new experiences and memories for people, although not quite in the sense of the ‘Total Recall’ film… well at least not quite yet!

I used the memory clip approach during my days at Thomas Cook Signature where I was brought in to transform their brand, and visually move it away from the dated and clichéd travel agent style of photography that was previously employed. The aim was simple, the previous brand imagery was tired and needed reinvigorating. So we created a more engaging coffee table style magazine feel to their branding, to distinguished it from the mainstream stock photographic usage that previously. This proved very successful and totally transformed their brand presentation and sense of customer (and staff!) engagement!

Often the smallest details can create the biggest impressions. Tiny things that take us back in time to an exact moment or experience. The concept of memory clip photography is simple. Snippets of visual information trigger larger emotional memories or responses of the heart and subconscious. In essence, they are a thumbnail image to a bigger picture of an emotional experience stored in a persons memory. In life, it is often these small details from a much big experience, that we tend to remember the most. These small aspects then stimulate and retrieve the bigger, fuller experience of the event, moment or experience. For me, a great example of this was with a small humble ticket stub from a visit to the Eiffel tower in Paris many years ago…

ticket stub from the Eiffel tower

I loved he simple design of the ticket and how the angled tear off portion gave the ticket a tower like profile. Such small details please me! I not only remembered it, but ended up keeping the ticket as a design example souvenir. I still have it to this day nearly some twenty years later!

A small disposable ticket stub made a big impression with me. But it goes way beyond the simple item itself. It’s an easy to remember item, but it triggers all the memories associated with the whole weekend spent away with my wife in Paris for her birthday. It creates a meaningful narrative and a lasting engagement with me.

As an image it might be unusual, but it is far more evocative and engaging than a stereotypical tourist picture of me standing in front of the Eiffel tower that’s for sure!

In my own photography, I’m all about exploring the concept of creating evocative memory clips. I love to capture small details of interest and intrigue, if you want, feel free to check out or follow what draws my eye and my lens…